The Pop’s Rhinoceros (34 page)

The servants follow, wheezing beneath their loads. His appointed place awaits him in the center of the gallery, but something is missing. He looks again into the corridor, peering over greasy heads and hoods … there. An enormous gilt-encrusted chair is wobbling toward him. Other servants are pressing themselves against the walls to allow it passage. It is upside-down. Legs are visible beneath.

“Chair!” barks Colonna as it passes. The chair halts. He hits it with his staff. It continues, only now it is his guests being asked to stand aside, and the gallery is already crowded, somewhat sweaty, too, no one is too pleased at deferring to a piece of furniture. The chair’s progress slows. And slows. And stops. A mountainous woman has flattened herself against the rail of the balcony and is trying to pretend that really there is no problem, if the chair would merely continue, then she could do the same, engaged there in flirtatious conversation with—who? Colonna squints—the Spaniard. Vich. The chair is making little charges, rebounding off the woman’s stomach. The width of the gallery; the width of the chair; the width of Vich’s mistress: these dimensions are in basic disagreement, and now Ascanio and Umberto are laughing openly, his old comrades smirking discreetly. Even Vittoria’s lips are pursed. The chair grows more frantic, the woman’s expression appearing by turns poised and toadlike as the contraption buffets her, until one of Vich’s party steps forward and solves the problem by kicking out the unsteady legs beneath. The chair collapses, Vich offers his hand, and Colonna watches the flesh-mountain step daintily over.

For a moment he is enraged, but several of his guests are applauding the maneuver. He wavers, undecided. He stares, unconvinced. And then the mists in his mind seem to thin and clear.

“You!” He points.

Don Jerònimo approaches, already gesuring to the woman.

“Lord Colonna, allow me to present my companion, the lady Fiamm—”

He points again. “The mulish one. The kicker.” He stares harder as the man steps over outstretched legs and squeezes past the plump, soft bodies. Dark hard face … is it? Yes, he is right. A face he knows from a cloudless place, the one time spared him by his wound.

“Ravenna,” Colonna says, as the soldier’s face draws near. “You fought at Ravenna.”

“Yes, my lord,” answers Don Diego.

The other battles drift by him in watery confusion, their clangor and stench all mingled and mazed, but this place remains. The secret sanctuary of his wound—Diego would understand. Ravenna’s lesson would be written on him, too. The chattering heads to his left and right puffed and blew off, filling the air with their noise. What could they know unless they too had flattened themselves in Ravenna’s cold mud, had jerked and shivered, fouling themselves beneath the French cannon-fire? He remembered men standing witlessly in the midst of it all. Cardona’s companies were routed or fled and, not about to silence those guns, they were trapped in the marsh with no cover for retreat. He’d ordered the horses brought up, and they had charged. The cannon had plucked men from their horses, scything through flesh and bone. Riders had vanished entire in sprays of red and white. Hillocks rising out of the marsh’s black mud had snapped the horses’ legs like twigs. He had fallen heavily, stunned, and come to surrounded by boys. His drummers had found him and were looking to him, waiting for his word. Something was wrong with his ears; he could hear only deep rumbles and thuds. He’d looked about and seen the ground rising to their left, drifting smoke. “This way,” he’d directed them. They must not panic, must not break now. “This way, men.”

But they were boys. Untried children. He had lost his bearings, and the cannon-noise had seemed to surround them. “This is the way. …” They would be safe now, safe with their commander, who had fought these battles for thirty years from Naples to the Alps, who had survived a belly-wound at Gaeta, who had killed a hundred men with the knife they could see at his side, who had walked from the killing-ground too many times to fall here. Why should Ravenna prove different?

“My captors told me your company fought like devils,” he tells Diego.

“We fought as Aragonese, my lord,” replies the man in blunt tones. Behind him, Colonna can see Don Jerònimo and his consort—has he seen her somewhere before?—stranded awkwardly, waiting to speak or be spoken to.

“I would keep your Colonel Diego about me tonight, Don Jerònimo.” The Ambassador nods graciously. Colonna nods his thanks. The Ambassador makes a little bow and begins shuffling back along the crowded gallery, his woman in tow. A hothead by many accounts, Vich. A cold and clever one by others.

“No longer ‘Colonel,’ my lord,” Diego says.

“Peace has always made fools of men like us,” replies Colonna. He does not wish to hear more. Complex clouds of rumor hang about Diego. Something happened
at Prato; some ineradicable stain colors the man attending him now. He was not there and saw nothing. He does not wish to know. He wishes to know less and less of the days since Ravenna.

He remembered that crossbowmen had come into view on their flank. He turned his little company about, but more appeared ahead. The battle was all but over. The crossbowmen were a ragged lot, grinning as they strolled forward, swinging their weapons casually, calling to one another. “Hold fast,” he called. They were only drummer boys. The crossbowmen moved nearer, and he could see puzzlement wash over the nearest faces. Only drummer boys, but he could not lay down his sword for them. He called again, “Choose your man,” and when he said it he saw incredulity even as the soldiers raised their arms. The boys were whimpering about him. He shouted, “Colonna!” and ran forward. He saw them shoulder arms. He heard the tock and thud of the loosed bolts finding targets and the high screams start up behind him. His shoulder first, then a second later his leg, low down somewhere and knocking him to the floor. He lay flat and looked back to see his boys had not moved, only bunched tighter together in their terror. They were shrieking now. The crossbows were reloading almost casually. Some were trying to crawl forward, and the men were kicking them back to their fellows, heavy kicks that lifted them off the ground like sacks. He prayed to a blade of grass. He saw them walk toward him. Knees in the small of his back pinning him down, a thrashing metal spider. Fingers busy at his throat and the gush of air and light as they stripped his helmet. A foot bearing down hard on his neck, he felt the instrument’s blunt nose butt his skull, the finger squeezing the trigger, hearing the moment explode and crumble like a stone smashed on an anvil and just before it a word whispered in his ear that he had not understood. Meurtrier. They had pressed the crossbow to his head and fired a bolt into his skull. The French surgeons had sawed off the shaft and left the barbed head in his brain. Merr-tree-aye. It was still there. He lived.

Below, in the nave of Santissimi Apostoli, a pig is being strung by the hocks and hoisted up to swing twenty feet above the floor. A thurible soon joins it, belching thick smoky arcs that the pig’s wilder trajectories intersect and cut, sending fragrant wafts of olibanum forward to do battle with the noxious airs of the crypt. Servants carrying brimming churns have bunched together at the far end of the gallery. “Deploy yourselves evenly!” bellows a barrel-chested major-domo into uncomprehending faces. One or two begin to pluck at the draw-strings of their hoses. “Spread out! There!” He points across the nave to the opposite side. They lug the slopping churns by their handles. Chicken-carriers follow. “Not you!” Chicken-carriers stop. Vich’s mistress is proving something of a problem again. Ascanio is essaying a handstand, and Vittoria seems to be, perhaps, praying?

Below, flanked by his deacon and subdeacon and surrounded by a gaggle of grubbily smocked urchins, a bearlike man strides powerfully down the nave. Behind
the rood-screen he deposits a chalice with a bang on the altar. A Bible follows. The urchins form lines to either side of the chancel and begin limbering up, drawing deep breaths and emitting piercing squawks. Ushers stand at the doors through which dim sounds can now be heard, muffled shouting, wolf-whistles, the odd thud. Father Tommaso cracks his knuckles and looks to his choir, his ushers, up to the gallery, where the majordomo nods solemnly back at him. His deacons have disappeared through a small door in the transept. He follows.

The sacristy is somewhat cramped: the corner of some other building seems to have broken through the facing wall and beached itself here like the prow of an unpiloted vessel, effectively dividing the once square room into two triangular ones. With the help of his deacon he pulls on alb, chasuble, amice, stole, rummaging amid the layers of linen to girdle himself with the cingulum, held out by Brother Bruno, a tough, wiry-haired native of Ripetta. Brother Fulvio busies himself with tapers and tablets of incense, whose cloying smoke quickly fills the cubbyhole. Bruno and Father Tommaso exchange glances. Brother Fulvio is tall and willowy, fair-haired and blue-eyed, a Perugian, in Rome for three weeks now and lodging with Tommaso on the orders of his Bishop, who had been charmed by letters of introduction mentioning “the humility of Saint Francis.” Well, taming wolves was one thing; Tommaso would have liked to see Saint Francis celebrate Mass for the Colonnas.

“There will be incidents,” he begins, “but so long as the tanners don’t turn up …” At that moment a piercing whine reaches all three pairs of ears, modulating into a soprano squeal, resolving itself as a kind of screech coming from the main body of the church:
“Ex-cla-ma-ve-runt ad te”
—a pause—
“domin-aaayy…”
The choir has begun singing.

“Idiots!” barks Father Tommaso as a louder din begins to echo down the nave, bangs and shouts, hammerings, the sound of the faithful called to prayer. Bruno hands him the maniple, lights candles, as a first
“Alleluia-aaa!”
drifts in from the chancel, then a second one, longer, its jubilus more drawn out still, and more bangs and thuds and shouts, the swinging pig squealing. Fulvio closes the lid of the thurible, crosses himself, and precedes them both into the church.
“Exultate iusti …,”
quavers the choir.
“Introiboadaltaredei-eee,”
hums Father Tommaso.
“Ad deum quiletificatinventutam rne-am,”
descants Bruno.
“Iudica me deus”
—rattling along quite nicely here—
“to-oo-tum”
—a glare at the choir in passing. They go through the routine again. He murmurs,
“Deus tu conversus vivificabis nos …”
Gets,
“Et plebs tua letabitur in te,”
in response. The church is lit with candles set into the pillars upholding the gallery. Aloft, the thurible appears to have ensnared itself with the pig, for both are being untangled (
“Domine exaudi orationem meam …”
) by serving men who lean out over the nave. Faces peer down at him: Vittoria’s (rapt), Ascanio’s (bored), Don Geraldo’s, and Villefranche’s. The old man stares stonily ahead. Behind him a soldier is toying with his helmet and three identically dressed women are … no, in fact, they are not. There is only
one after all. Very fat. Suddenly the pig and thurible are set to swinging once again; smoke and squealing as the choir reaches its twelfth Alleluia, the door begins to shudder as though being battered from without, and Father Tommaso shouts, “Ready?” down the nave to his ushers, who nod and move to unbar the doors.
“Dominus vobiscum,”
he intones as the little procession reaches the rood-screen. Tommaso turns, flexes his shoulders, takes up a position in front of the screen. Bruno mumbles,
“Et cum spiritu tuo
…
“
in reply. They glance at each other, old comrades and veterans. Fulvio has continued on to disappear somewhere behind the screen.

“What?” murmurs Colonna, lost for the moment in a quite different thought. “Have we begun yet?”

“Right,” the priest commands his ushers. “Let the bastards in.”

Don Diego watches the heavy crossbars slide back, jam momentarily as the doors are pressed from without, then jerk free. The ushers stagger, suddenly encumbered with the oaken rails’ full weight, the doors just as suddenly weightless, it seems, for they shiver, clatter, spring lightly open to reveal the faithful stilled in the doorway, mouths agape, silent and cowed, stopped dead in their already stopped tracks. A couple look half-wonderingly back at the bobbing heads behind. Impossible, this moment. No one quite believes it. The line of pressed and waiting bodies swells for a second, then breaks, outriders and vanguards forming to make the breach in the undefended church’s skin.

Its defenders take their stand a little behind the ambo, Bruno at their center, legs braced, arms hung loose and at the ready. He eyeballs the advancing congregation. “Hold it… Hold it!” Face them down at the start. He singles out a beefy individual leading a mastiff by the collar whom several more timorous rogues are nudging forward. “You! Yes, you. No dogs!” He is ignored. A flanking movement is creeping around to his left. Diego nods approvingly to himself. Delay them, thinks Bruno. Take their brunt here. A right-hand movement has joined the left—the inevitable pincer-maneuver—and now the center is edging up the middle of the nave, shunted forward by the press of bodies behind, drawn on by the luxuriant unoccupied space before. Bruno’s retreat is inevitable. It must be measured, unforced. One step at a time. Good God, one of them’s brought a brace of chickens! Bruno glances heavenward to where the pig still swings, momentarily silenced by the sweaty surge of bodies below. Ignore the pig.

Those already in the church are coming to rest, or something approaching rest—a lot of scratching, nudging, and toe-treading is still going on. The ingress of bodies outside is slowing, ineffective shunts and squirmings to get in proving less and less effective, some kind of equilibrium is reached. The field is taken, thinks Don Diego above. Raise standards.

But the congregation gathered to celebrate the feast of Phillip and James possesses no standard, knows no victorious cry beyond the rumbling of stomachs, so they stand there and jostle stupidly amongst themselves. What now?

Like Prato, thinks Don Diego. Like the horrible quiet of Prato in the dumb moments before the nails and hammers were produced, the fires lit and dice rolled. The aimless yawning hiatus, the gluey bog of the Pratesi’s nonresistance. Clambering over the low turret to the breach their laborious cannonade had at last opened—it was already late in the afternoon—Diego saw Prato’s defenders either fleeing or mooning in half-embarrassed fashion by the Porta del Serraglio like children caught in a game of hide-and-seek, knowing they are too old for this silliness. His halberdiers were pushing at them, nudging them back, but it was too desultory, and when challenged, the Pratesi simply dropped their weapons with a shrugging gesture. His own sword was tight in his hand, its hilt seeming to pierce the heel of his hand and weld itself to the bones in his arm, so indivisible were they. He did not understand this soft yielding of theirs, this nothingness, like a fawning dog that no matter how many times you kick at it will drift back and nuzzle to be fed, this cloying passivity. It enraged him. He understood his halberdier singling one of them out, cursing and shouting—this being somehow ludicrous, forced, goading at a different level—pushing the unprotesting man back against the wall he should have been defending, using the butt of his pike to drop him, the point to stick him. Then his turning from this miserable execution still unsatisfied, the same question still written in his bafflement. What next? What now?